tldr:

The process I went through to quickly clean up a 3d scan from my phone to make it suitable for 3d printing.

3D scans from your phone are not likely to end up being perfect, unbroken surfaces, unless you were very, very careful when scanning.

However, sometimes, you can’t go back and scan the same thing, because it’s far away, or doesn’t look like that anymore. If you want to 3D print the scan, you’ll just have to work with what you’ve got.

Here is a video showing how to ‘remesh’ an object.

Basically, it’s the equivalent of saran-wrapping your existing mesh. You lose the color from the original mesh, but you gain the ability to 3D print it. Plus, most 3D print jobs are going to be single-color affairs.

For the Remesh process, I turned the Octree Depth to 8 or 9 for good results based on the complexity of my model. Going any higher than that resulted in both diminshing returns, and an exponential performance slowdown on my poor laptop.

I couldn’t really figure out what the Scale parameter did, but any value between 0.9 and 1.0 worked fine.

For extra credit, I tried to keep the textures of the model, but I couldn’t figure out how to work with UVs in blender.

If I could have figured it out, the idea is that you would ‘bake’ the textures from your full-of-holes-but-still-textured mesh onto your remeshed, well, mesh.

This forum post tried to explain it.

Lastly, for 3D printing, sometimes, the model you have doesn’t look like it would balance all that well, so you can add a base to the object to make it stand up.

Especially if you scanned a person, people typically stand on floors. When remeshing, the floor often turns into a bit of a patchy mess, which is technically one piece, but is a far cry from structurally supportive.

So, to combine two meshes (the base and the scan), I used this stack exchange tip.

Hopefully these tips help you quickly go from a phone scan to a (single-color) 3d print.